A Place to Stand

Comments from Scotland on politics, technology & all related matters (ie everything)/"The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary."Henry Louis Mencken....WARNING - THE LIBERAL DEMOCRATS HAVE DECIDED THAT THIS BLOG IS LIKELY TO BE MISTAKEN FOR AN OFFICIAL PARTY SITE (no really, unanimous decision) I PROMISE IT ISN'T SO ENTER FREELY & OF YOUR OWN WILL

Saturday, March 24, 2007

Last December I reported how Alan Thorpe boss of the National Environment Research Council had boasted in the Guardian of his desire to engage in a public debate on warming

'We need, very urgently, to discuss what to do now to mitigate the effects of climate change,' he said. 'Yet a handful of scientists, politicians and writers are still claiming humans are not responsible at all. We have got to kill off this notion so we can get on with the real work: protecting ourselves from future climate change. That is why I am challenging these deniers. I want them to outline their case so that it can be judged by scientists. That is something these people have been reluctant to do so far.'

NERC is a government funded alarmist body & Mr Thorpe is described as "Britain's leading climate scientist so they certainly should be willing to tell the taxpayers why they believe this. On reply to an email I spent asking how impartial they are & how many projects they had funded by sceptics I got

Most of NERC's funding, about Â£370 million a year, comes from the science budget, ie public funding. Just under Â£50 million comes from external sources, a breakdown of which is published in NERC facts (see our website)We do not accept any funding which does not allow us to publish the outcomes. We take some commissions which require a delay in publication for commercial in confidence reasons.Those who apply to us for research funding have their proposals submitted for peer review by external experts. Funding is allocated only to those applications with high quality ratings. There is no 'quota' system for research on one or the other side of an issue. The quality of proposals, assessed by independent review, is only criterion.

I am not convinced that our government are an entirely independent source on the warming controversy & more importantly the 2nd question is clearly not answered.

I happen to know that a very senior sceptic immediately offered to participate in this debate.

Since then Mr Thorpe has been silent. He seems to have made no attempt to defend this "urgent" gauntlet. willll be sending this to him [ a.j.thorpe@reading.ac.uk ] & should he wish to respond or otherwise participate in the urgent debate he has called for I will be happy to report it.

I did report this at the time but he declined to respond then. It would be unkind to suggest that he is frit because he knows that beyond his own bluster the warmers case cannot survive honest debate (as seen in New York recently) & it is conceivable that there may be some unknown reason for his reticence.

Friday, March 23, 2007

An article by writer Orson Scott Card on how Stephen McIntyre proved that the Hockeystick theory of global warming was wrong. More importantly that Michael Mann, who produced it hid the details in such a specific way that there can be no reasonable doubt that he was not incompetent, but engaged in deliberate fraud.

And that the IPCC & the numerous journals which refused to publish the evidence but were willing to publish gratuitous attack on him, either also knew it was a fraud or would have if any of the hundreds of researchers involved had cared to look.

Here's the amazing thing about Mann's original report: He's not the only researcher working in this field. In fact, it's the job of many hundreds of researchers to refuse to accept his data at face value. After all, his findings disagree with everyone else's. Before they accept his results, they have a duty to look at his software, look at his data, and try to duplicate his results.

But nobody does it. Not a soul.........

So Steve starts digging. First, he read's Mann's original report. He finds it an exercise in obscurity. From what he published, it's very, very hard to tell just what statistical methods Mann used, or even what data he operated on.

This is wrong -- it's not supposed to be that way. Scientists are supposed to leave a clear path so other people can follow them up and replicate their research.

The fact that it's so obscure suggests that Mann does not want anyone checking his work.

But Mann used government grants in his research. Which means he has an obligation to disclose. Steve contacts him, asks for the information. He gets a runaround. He gets pointed to a website that does not have the information. He tries again, and again gets a runaround -- in fact, Mann sends him a very rude letter saying that he will no longer communicate with him.........

But Steve is now sure there's something fishy going on, and he doesn't give up. He gets other people to help him. Finally they are pointed to a different website, where, to their surprise, they find that someone has accidentally left a copy of the FORTRAN program that was used to crunch the numbers. It wasn't supposed to be where Steve found it -- which is why it hadn't been deleted.......

What's crucial is that Steve now understands why the "censored" data sets are smaller than the ones Mann used. The full source data includes those misleading results that shouldn't have been used. But the "censored" data sets leave it out.

This means that Mann knew exactly what he was doing. This was not an accident. Mann ran the program on the data without the misleading numbers, and then he ran it with the misleading numbers........

Meanwhile, serious publications did publish Mann's savage response to what Steve was saying on the website where he was putting up his results for everyone to read.....

The Hockey Stick Hoax should be a scandal as big as the discovery of the Piltdown Man Hoax. Bigger, really, since so much more is at stake.

But because the media are dominated by True Believers, they are doing everything they can to maintain the hoax, to keep the public from learning the truth.

What were those bad numbers Mann plugged in to get his fake results? Modern bristlecone pine tree-ring data in which recent tree rings showed the widths that would normally mean unusually warm weather.

However, these trees were located near temperature recording stations that showed lower than usual temperatures. So instead of being a sign of warmer temperatures, the tree rings are actually responding to the increased CO2 levels......

Because for the past three years, global temperatures have been falling.

Oops.

The IPCC & all those scientific journals owe Stephen McIntyre a fulsome public apology. Everybody in any way involved in supporting the warming scare should publicly demand they do so & that all those individuals who failed in their duty to exercise proper scepticism or who attacked McIntyre for what he said without giving him space to say it, are unfit to hold responsible scientific positions. Obviously anybody who maintains catastrophic warming without being willing to denounce the IPCC's position on the Hockeystick is, under no circumstances, to be trusted.

Thursday, March 22, 2007

FURTHER CORRESPONDENCE

Dear Mr Craig

I don't carry a torch for any side in this war. I have no idea what the ICTY has accepted from the Government of the RS. However, as the recipient of an award from the RS last year I would say that ICMP has gone to demonstrable lengths to search for the missing regardless of ethnic group. We have fully accepted the list of the missing provided to us by the RS Government and will seek to find and identify all victims.

Many of the sites excavated in relation to the fall of Srebrenica have been provided by the Government of the RS in their reports on the events of July 1995. But Srebrenica is far from our only focus. We work on sites throughout the RS, Serbia and Croatia.

Whether an act was genocide or not is not for me to judge. The act itself (however judged) resulted in missing persons and our mandate is to find the missing and help identify them. As I said earlier a lot (70%) of those killed in the war did not disappear.

All sides had phenomenal losses. I pointed you towards the Research and Documentation Centre because I feel it is a useful source which has put the lie to initial inflated figures. I was not referring to NATO figures when I mentioned that but to figures in currency during the war which were deliberately used to mislead.

As to your postscript I did not say who fired the bullet into the skull on the examination table. The bullet was there but I don't know who fired the bullet and I did not speculate. We don't know the ethnicity of the victim until we get results from DNA analysis and even then we do not report nationality, ethnicity, sex or religion. As to the type of gun it is pretty clear that all sides used similar weapons so it would be difficult to determine who shot a bullet from the manufacturer of the gun.

I appreciate that your intention is to establish the truth of what happened and I have tried to honestly provide information to you about what ICMP does. I can see that you don't accept what I have said but I think that this is largely because ICMP does not get involved in the apportionment or determination of blame and we don't cover many of the areas for which you have questions.

Best wishes

Adam Boys.............................Dear Mr Boys, I thank you for taking time out to reply to me. I accept that the decisionmaking as to what is & is not genocide, what prosecutions to bring & what information to pass on does not lie with you but with others. If I have been hard on you it is because those others have made themselves less open to scrutiny which is not really fair on you.

Nonetheless I do think that the Izetbegovic regime's claims seem to have been taken on trust, even when thousands of the Srebrenica garrison have been found to have reached Moslem lines, despite his initial claim that they hadn't & evidence that many of those registered as dead have voted in elections post mortuum. Also, despite our correspondence, I have seen no specific evidence that the Serb villagers, victims of Oric's genocide, are being seriously searched for or that very many of the bodies labelled as Moslem militia, may not in fact be Serb villagers. Without further evidence, however, I don't think we can reach a conclusion.

It would be improper of me to ask you to agree that, in deciding to classify the alleged massacre of soldiers as genocide but laying no charges against Oric for the massacre of civilians, the ICTY have proven to be corrupt & unworthy. Nonetheless it is my view that, the definition of genocide being what it is, they are.

Thank you for clarifying the Scotsman's statement. The fact that you had the bullet means that their statement & quote was more truthful than I had expected though clearly not fully so.

Even EU leaders seem to accept that the decision, under pressure from Germany, to pressure Izetbegovic to declare "independence" by promising "recognition" was a, arguably the, major cause of the war & that they were advised that a genocidal war would be the inevitable result of their action. Since Izetbegovic had no legal claim to the Presidency & was not in control of most of the territory he claimed sovereignty over this "recognition" was contrary to law. I would like to hope there will someday be an uncorrupt judicial examination of these wars & that information gathered by you & others will be of value

Wednesday, March 21, 2007

This is a follow up to my previous post on the Scotsman's censorship. Following a reminder to Mr Boys he gave the reply at the bottom to which my response is immediately below. The latest Scotman report is here.:

Dear Mr Boys, Thank you for your reply. It seems you do not know of any store of DNA of relatives of the victims of the primary massacre, that of the villagers around Srebrenica, & obviously consequently could not, even in theory, identify any of the bodies of Serb victims by relative's DNA. Or obviously say with certainty that most of the masses of bodies are Serbs.

From what you say the ICTY have not passed on the documents that Republika Srpska gave them as evidence of atrocities against Serbs. I understand this contains the names of at least 3870 identiffied individuals. I assume they also have not passed on the original report that RS made of the massacring at Srebrenica since Mr Ashdown attempted to destroy all copies. It is available on pdf here http://www.slobodan-milosevic.org/news/smorg-sreb101604.htm . Estimable though the Serbian media may be it is clear that the ICTY could & in my view should, have provided you with much more thorough sources. Without access to Serbian sources of information about atrocities against them it is obviously impossible for your organisation to investigate properly. I suspect that the current figures of those who died in that war of between 100,000 & 40,000 may well apply to Moslem & Croat victims. The original NATO figure of 300,000 may be correct - the rest being Serbs. This would explain the otherwise inexplicable demographic reduction in B&H's Serbian population, despite the incursion of refugees from the ethnic cleansing & genocide in Croatia.

Such suppression by the ICTY is clearly a perversion of the course of justice.

I am also surprised that you are not aware of the legal definition of genocide since I would have thought it quite germane to your investigations, particularly if any of it were at any time to be used in a "court" See

1) the mental element, meaning the "intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such", and

2) the physical element which includes five acts described in sections a, b, c, d and e. A crime must include both elements to be called "genocide

May I also draw your attention to Bill Clinton's legal differentiation of what happened in Ruanda as not bieng "genocide" but merely "acts of genocide". In the same way 2 Albanian bodies, arguably combat casualties, found in Kosovo have been classed as genocide but 210 non-Albanians at Dragodan were counted ae 210 graves in the same place. This latter ceases to be proof of more than "acts of genocide" rather than a campaign. How you phrase your reports may therefore be of great importance, unless the ICTY rewrite them before investigating.

Clearly Oric's murder of entire villages was indeed was indeed an attempt to destroy Serbs as either a religious or ethnic groip. As such the ICTY could only possibly have failed to describe ot as genocide if they are wholly & completely corrupt. The alleged killing of the Militia of Srebrenica, even had it happened, was certainly not an attempt to destroy the whole Moslem population of Srebrenica. Indeed it is agreed by all parties that Mladic made every effort, successfully, to protect the women & general civilian population of Srebrenica. Whether it & an unfortunately numerous number of killings of combat soldiers across the world, counts as genocide or not it is undeniably the case that, as a human being, Mladic is at least thousands of time more moral than Oric & at least hundreds of times more humane than the NATO politicians & NATO funded "judges" who protected Oric.

Yours

Neil Craig

PS The previous Scotsman article claimed that you had described a body as having been killed by a Serb, using a Kalashnikov, execution style. Another commenter asked about this & I don't know if you have replied direct to him. Since you have given an assurance that you do not express an opinion as to who did any killing & there is an obvious difficulty in identifying the gun & "style" of killing without a bullet would I be correct in assuming that you did not make that statement. That it was fabricated in a way clearly likely to inspire hatred of Serbs & support of NATO's Nazi friends.--------------------------------------My previous correspondence to Mr Boys said:How many of the bodies of the 3870 Serb civilians in surrounding villages murdered by the Moslem militia have been identified?

How many of their relatives DNA profiles have you on record.?

Does the deliberate murder of 3870 men women & children, non-conatants legally count as gennocide?

If so what evidence have you that Oric & his men were not involved, that would justify the failure to charge him with genocide? --------------------- Thanks for your e-mail:

1. It would depend upon how many went missing. I am not trying to avoid the question but if someone is killed but the relatives etc know where the body is and bury that body then the individual would not be reported missing. As far as I understand, from reading reports in Serbian media, the Serb civilians and soldiers reported as killed in the area around Srebrenica were not buried in mass graves. That does not mean that I am saying that people were not killed but it does mean that our organisation would not necessarily hear about them as they would not be reported as missing. That's why the Documentation Centre may be a better port of call as they record all deaths regardless of what happened to the body after death.

2. We have about 80% of blood references for all missing persons generally. For the RS as a whole we are little bit lower than that but we have had a good response from RS politicians in trying to get the message out. Specifically, the parameters of your question are difficult to answer because - as in 1. above - it is difficult to know how many of those killed in villages around Srebrenica were not found after death. Again, if they were killed but it was known where the body lay after death then there would have been no report to ICRC or ICMP.

3. I am no lawyer and I hope that you accept that I can't speculate about a judgement that a court would make. I honestly do not know what constitutes a judgement of genocide.

4. I have no evidence either way as that sort of thing is not something we look for in any situation. As I said, we don't look at cause and manner of death. We just try to identify the missing regardless of ethnic group.

Tuesday, March 20, 2007

Gordon Brown has exhibited a "Stalinist ruthlessness" in government, belittling his cabinet colleagues whom the Treasury treats with "more or less complete contempt", ..........In an interview with the Financial Times, Lord Turnbull, permanent secretary to the Treasury for four years under Mr Brown before becoming cabinet secretary in 2002, accused the prime minister-in-waiting of a "very cynical view of mankind and his colleagues".

"He cannot allow them any serious discussion about priorities. His view is that it is just not worth it and "they will get what I decide". And that is a very insulting process," Lord Turnbull said.............."This has been an unworthy development in the sense that it belittles other ministers. The surprising thing about the Treasury is the more or less complete contempt with which other colleagues are held."

"So if you want something done about planning, or about the environment, you don't talk to Ruth Kelly or David Miliband and say "we really must do something about this". Instead you summon up Kate Barker,{author of the Barker report on housing} or you get Andrew Gowers in to do intellectual property, rather than talk to the DTI." ..........The chancellor, he said, had kept control of those budgets "entirely to himself".

"That has been impressive, but in a sense reprehensible. There has been an absolute ruthlessness with which Gordon has played the denial of information as an instrument of power."

Onn the other hand Eddie George former Governor of the Bank of England said

Lord George when the former governor of the Bank of England said he had been "very surprised" when Mr Brown proceeded to set up the Financial Services Authority, the City watchdog, without consulting him. However, he disagreed with the characterisation of Mr Brown as a man who used the "denial of information as a source of power".

Lord George told a committee of MPs that the chancellor was normally willing to hear his views, but it took time to build up a relationship based on trust. "I accepted that he had certain decisions and they were decisions for him to take. But he always gave me the opportunity to express my opinion."

"The FSA was different. I was very surprised. I thought we were going to talk about that. That was introduced very soon after the MPC for reasons you would have to ask him about." Asked whether there was a "spirit of openness", between them, Lord George replied: "Yes. It took a time to build up." "I had to persuade him I could trust him. I think that kind of relationship is very important and I would encourage both sides to continue it."

Well it takes quite a lot to piss off Sir Humphrey so much he goes public. Though Lord Turnball has said this was an "off the record" briefing I don't think he is that niave. The mandarin has clearly felt "belittled" by Brown & has come out at as damaging a moment as possible. It has been suggested that Blair is behind this & is trying to encourage somebody else to stand but I doubt it because this makes it look like Brown is already the real PM while Blair is doing his prefered job of US roving ambassador. This fits quite well with Blair's partnership joke "he does the work & I take the credit". It is mot good to be caught showing contenpt for your cabinet colleagues even, perhaps particularly, when it is justified. Clearly Gordon does have a problem with personal interaction which is a very serious thing for a politician but less so for an administrater.

On the other hand better than Jim Hacker being told "your civil servants say you are a pleasure to work for". In my opinion the Barker Report which is mentioned as an example of his overawing colleagues is a very good piece of work. It is not quite as free marketish about housing as I would like but does, unlike almost any political statement from any party, acknowledge that the laws of supply & demand do work on housing & that the solution must be to allow the building of more. This compares, for example, very favourably with the Tory policy in Scotland limited to subsidising some government building of "affordable housing" to provide tied houses for government employees.

If Gordon Brown is highly intelligent & if he really knows what he is doing (& I grant the latter is questionable) then, by these lights he might turn out to be a PM who does an exceptional amount of good for the country even if he doesn't have the easy charm of his predecessor.

Monday, March 19, 2007

Iain Dale put up an item on his blog on the possibility of Mr Miliband running successfully against Gordo, Iain expressed a relatively high opinion of him. I disagreed & more interestingly almost everybody else did too.

I am reposting my reply here partly because when I reread it I still found it funny. I know I have been biting a number of people recently & will have to find somebody to say nice things about, apart from Milosevic & Simon who are dead.

I must admit I think you are being a bit naughty talking up Milipede who would make Cameron look deep.

I have commented a couple of times on his blog on which his thoughts are paraded & I didn't see any flashes of anything more than cliche. You have commented before on his blog & expense thereof. the blog had been alleged to be horribly expensive which annoys other political bloggers who don't get 40 grand from the government

His vision seems to be about giving us "carbon footprint" ration books & putting our rubbish in numerous bins. I think he is this generation's Michael Meacher - who rises without trace by spouting politically correct nonsense because he has the advantage of not being equipped to question it.